A Home for Billy Wilder

Charles and Ray Eames’s Steel-and-Glass Concept for the Director

It was 1949, and the Oscar-winning director and acidic raconteur Billy Wilder had two very different houses spinning around in his electrically creative imagination. One was an immense, dreary heap in which a madwoman loses what’s left of her shaky mind in the odd Hollywood-on-Hollywood movie he was writing and filming that year. The other was a steel-and-glass gem for him and his sharp, chic wife, Audrey, to live in. The former, owned by one of J. Paul Getty’s ex-wives, was sweetened (or, perhaps better, further soured) for the occasion by Paramount’s art director, Hans Dreier, and his team of set decorators, who added gloomy draperies and a few stained-glass windows to enhance the mansion’s funereal air (see Architectural Digest, April 1998). The latter, with its clean angles and spare construction, was designed for the Wilders by their close friends Charles and Ray Eames. The musty, fusty mansion would be the architectural expression of its occupant’s dreadfully declining state of mind. The Eames house would be all about clear light and air.

The madwoman, of course, is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), the centerpiece of Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which a blown-out tire sends a young screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), careening into the has-been star’s driveway. “It was a great big white elephant of a place,” Gillis tells us in noirish voice-over—“the kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in Great Expectations—that Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world because she’d been given the go-by.”

Wilder, along with his coscreenwriters, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman, Jr., had been cooking up Sunset Boulevard since late 1948. It’s a film permeated by death and cobwebby insanity, from the corpse floating in Norma’s pool to Norma’s dead monkey laid out, as she puts it, “on the massage table in front of the fire. He always liked fires, and poking at them with a stick!” Wilder even wrote and shot an opening scene that featured talking cadavers in the L.A. County morgue, a comically macabre scene that was scrapped after preview audiences reacted badly to it.

The house the Eameses designed for the Wilders, in contrast, was to be as sleek and fresh and forward-looking as the couple themselves. Wilder was introduced to the Eames-es by the graphic designer Alvin Lustig, who was using the garage of Wilder’s house on North Beverly Drive as a design studio. Wilder loved the elegant intelligence of the Eameses’ designs and bought a prototype of the soon-to-be-iconic 1946 plywood chairs.

Wilder had moved into the house on North Beverly in the spring of 1944. He was still married to his first wife, Judith, but the relationship was getting even rockier than it had been all along. He launched an affair with the actress Doris Dowling, who played the prostitute, Gloria, in his film The Lost Weekend (1945), but soon began cheating on his new mistress with Audrey Young, a snappy big-band singer who also played a bit part in The Lost Weekend. In March 1947, after a year and a half of legal separation, Judith’s divorce from Wilder was finalized. Doris Dowling moved to Rome, and Young moved in with Wilder.

In June 1949, just after completing principal photography on Sunset Boulevard, Wilder and Young decided to get married in Nevada, and they brought Charles and Ray Eames along for the ride. “We asked them one day whether he would like to be the best man and she the maid of honor, and they said, ‘Okay,’ ” Wilder once recalled. “And then the four of us took off to Nevada, where you can get married for two dollars in three minutes.”

The house the Eameses designed was to be sited on—of all places—Sunset Boulevard. Based on a residence they had designed and built for themselves (the Eames House, 1945-49), the Wilder House would be industrially modern, a 4,600-square-foot rectangular crystal of midcentury elegance. Extensive glass panels held by slim steel frames would let in the intense light of Southern California to an even greater degree than the Eameses’ own house did; they built their residence on a rather heavily wooded lot in Pacific Palisades, whereas the Wilder House, encircled by a flat concrete slab, would rise on an open Beverly Hills hilltop.

The Eameses’ design included boldly painted panels that defined distinct spaces within the clear glass structure: a sky-blue wall, an orange soffit, a sunny yellow partition. But these swaths of rich color were grace notes; the Eameses intended the two-story living room, multiple dining areas, study and three bedrooms and baths to be a series of freshly gessoed canvases that the Wilders would color with their own style—a newly acquired Picasso pastel here, a work Billy Wilder liked to call his “cashmere Schwitters” there, his two Lost Weekend Oscars.

The Wilders’ friend Walter Reisch once described Audrey as being “brilliant, beautiful and as hard as he is,” and the new house would have filled that bill as well. But Audrey talked Billy out of building it. She couldn’t be bothered with the upkeep. “Are you crazy?” she said to him. “It’s completely idiotic.” One might argue with her choice of words; for this couple, an early American davenport would have been “idiotic,” not a Modernist masterpiece. But she rightly foresaw that the glass sheath would have led to a lifetime of window washers peering in, so she pulled the plug.

They stayed on North Beverly Drive until late 1956, when they sold the house and moved to a penthouse apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The failure of their commissioned house for the Wilders did not dampen the Eameses’ friendship with the couple. They went on to conceive a very particular kind of chaise for Billy’s regular afternoon naps. “A man of my reputation simply can’t afford to have something that looks like a casting couch in his office. It’s too obvious a symbol of lechery,” Wilder told them. They designed the chaise for Wilder in 1968. It’s only 18 inches wide, which limits nap time: The sleeper must fall asleep with his arms folded over his middle, and when he descends deeper into sleep and his hands drop off and hit the floor, it’s time to wake up. The chaise’s narrow width also precludes any funny business, though, characteristically, Billy Wilder found a way to describe it precisely in those terms: “If you had a girlfriend shaped like a Giacometti, it would be ideal.”